February 25th
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“It gives me the highest satisfaction to find the Arts and sciences making a progress in any Country; but when I see them advancing in the rising States of America, I feel a peculiar pleasure, and in my opinion, every effort of genius and all attempts towards improving useful knowledge ought to meet with encouragement in this country.”
Adobe Firefly
To Nicholas Pike*
Mount Vernon, 20 June 1786
Sir,
Your letter of the 25th. of March did not come to hand ‘till lately, or it should have had an earlier acknowledgment.
It gives me the highest satisfaction to find the Arts and sciences making a progress in any Country; but when I see them advancing in the rising States of America, I feel a peculiar pleasure, and in my opinion, every effort of genius and all attempts towards improving useful knowledge ought to meet with encouragement in this country. Your performance is of the most useful and beneficial kind, and from the opinion of those Gentlemen who have inspected it, I have not the least doubt but that it is a very valuable one.
I feel a grateful sense of the honor which you designed me by wishing to dedicate your Book** to me, and would even sacrifice my own ideas of propriety respecting the matter, so far as to comply with your request, if I thought that by a non-compliance I should discourage, so good a work. But Sir, as there are several characters in your part of the country who deservedly hold a high rank in the literary world, and whose names would add dignity to such performance; it would be more proper (if I might presume to offer my opinion upon the matter) to dedicate your book to them.
I must therefore beg leave to decline the honor which you would do me, as I have before done in two or three cases of a similar kind.
With the sincerest wishes for the success of your work, and much esteem, I am Sir, Your Obdt Hume Servt
G:o Washington
* “New Hampshire teacher and arithmetician.” — Fitzpatrick, et al., WGW
** “A New and Complete System of Arithmetic, Composed for the Use of the Citizens of the United States, published in 1788.” — Fitzpatrick, et al., WGW
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